The secret formula for business growth

Ever feel like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders? Sometimes, consultants feel like they’re carrying a heavy load. After all, if you’re in business for yourself, you may be trying to do everything from sales to accounting. But there’s a secret formula that can help you.

It involves a little math. I won’t apologize for that. But you don’t really have to understand the math to get the point. A guy named Metcalfe worked out this law. You just need to get the idea — not the math.

The secret formula involves relationships. If you’re an independent consultant and the only person in your business, you have no relationships. There’s just you.

But, if you start making connections with other people, you’ll tap into the exponential power of relationships.

Let’s say you make a connection with 12 other people. You could meet these people at a personal party, a business networking event, a tradeshow, a course, a conference, a coffee shop – anywhere, really. It doesn’t take much to meet one new person a month. And, over the course of a year, you introduce each of those people to each of the other people.

You plus 12 other people. How many relationships is that?

78.

What? How did you go from yourself and nine other people to 78 relationships? How did meeting 12 other people and introducing them to one another expand your relationship power to 78? That’s almost eight times as many people as you met!

Well – you can skip this part, if you don’t like math, but the formula is n*(n-1)/2 = relationships.

You’re n.

In our case, there are a total of 13 people. You plus the other 12. And so 13*(13-1)/2=78.

So, from lonely you, we’ve grown to 78 relationships.

But what if you met two new people every month for a year AND introduced each of those people to the others by the end of the year? So, over the course of a year, you meet and introduce 24 people. So we’ve got 25 people in the equation.

By the end of the year, you’ll have built 300 relationships.

Wow.

And that’s assuming that none of those people introduce you to anyone outside that small network.

In my next post, I’ll look at what power you gain from the people those 24 other people know.